“I hate your bloody guts,” Gossim said.
Morley said, “I hate yours, too.”
“A Mexican standoff,” Niemand said. “You see, Mr. Gossim, you can’t make us stay; all you can do is yell.”
Making an obscene gesture toward Morley and Niemand Gossim strode off, parting the group gathered there, and disappeared somewhere on the far side. The office was quiet, now. Seth Morley immediately began to feel better.
“Arguments wear you out,” his wife said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “And Gossim wears me out. I’m tired just from this one interchange, forgetting the eight full years of it which preceded today. I’m going to go select a noser.” He rose, made his way from the office and into the midday sun.
A noser is a strange craft, he said to himself as he stood at the edge of the parking field surveying the lines of inert vessels. First of all, they were incredibly cheap; he could gain possession of one of these for less than four silver dollars. Secondly, they could go but never return; nosers were strictly one-way ships. The reason, of course, was simple: a noser was too small to carry fuel for a return trip. All the noser could do was kick off from a larger ship or a planetary surface, head for its destination, and quietly expire there. But– they did their job. Sentient races, human and otherwise, flocked throughout the galaxy aboard the little pod-like ships.
Goodbye, Tekel Upharsin, Morley said to himself, and made a brief, silent salute to the rows of orange bushes growing beyond the noser parking lot.
Which one should we take? he asked himself. They all looked alike: rusty, discarded. Like the contents of a used car lot back on Terra. I’ll choose the first one with a name on it beginning with M, he decided, and began reading the individual names.
The _Morbid Chicken_. Well, that was it. Not very transcendental, but fitting; people, including Mary, were always telling him that he had a morbid streak. What I have, he said to himself, is a mordant wit. People confuse the two terms because they sound similar.
Looking at his wristwatch he saw that he had time to make a trip to the packaging department of the citrus products factory. So he made off in that direction.
“Ten pint jars of class AA marmalade,” he said to the shipping clerk. It was either get them now or not at all.
“Are you sure you’re entitled to ten more pints?” The clerk eyed him dubiously, having had dealings with him before.
“You can check on my marmalade standing with Joe Perser,” Morley said. “Go ahead, pick up the phone and give him a call.”
“I’m too busy,” the clerk said. He counted out ten pint jars of the kibbutz’s main product and passed them to Morley in a bag, rather than in a cardboard carton.
“No carton?” Morley said.
“Scram,” the clerk said.
Morley got one of the jars out, making sure that they were indeed class AA. They were. “Marmalade from Tekel Upharsin Kibbutz!” the label declared. “Made from genuine Seville oranges (group 3-B mutational subdivision). Take a pot of sunny Spain into your kitchen or cooking cubicle!” “Fine,” Morley said. “And thanks.” He lugged the bulky paper bag from the building and out once more into the bright sun of midday.
Back again at the noser parking area he began getting the pints of marmalade stored away in the _Morbid Chicken_. The one good thing this kibbutz produces, he said to himself as he placed the jars one by one within the magnetic grip-field of the storage compartment. I am afraid this is one thing I’ll miss.
He called Mary on his neck radio. “I’ve picked out a noser,” he informed her. “Come on down to the parking area and I’ll show it to you.”
“Are you sure it’s a good one?”
“You know you can take my mechanical ability for granted,” Morley said testily. “I’ve examined the rocket engine, wiring, controls, every life-protect system, everything, completely.” He pushed the last jar of marmalade away in the storage area and shut the door firmly.
She arrived a few minutes later, slender and tanned in her khaki shirt, shorts and sandals. “Well,” she said, surveying the _Morbid Chicken_, “it looks rundown to me. But if you say it’s okay it is, I guess.”
“I’ve already begun loading,” Morley said.
“With what?”
Opening the door of the storage compartment he showed her the ten jars of marmalade.
After a long pause Mary said, “Christ.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You haven’t been checking the wiring and the engine. You’ve been out scrounging up all the goddam marmalade you could talk them out of.” She slammed the storage area door shut with venomous ire. “Sometimes I think you’re insane. Our lives depend on this goddam noser working. Suppose the oxygen system fails or the heat circuit fails or there’re microscopic leaks in the hull. Or–”
“Get your brother to look at it,” he interrupted. “Since you have so much more trust in him than you do in me.”
“He’s busy. You know that.”
“Or he’d be here,” Morley said, “picking out which noser for us to take. Rather than me.”
His wife eyed him intently, her spare body drawn up in a vigorous posture of defiance. Then, all at once, she sagged in what appeared to be half-amused resignation. “The strange thing is,” she said, “that you have such good luck– I mean in relation to your talents. This probably is the best noser here. But not because you can tell the difference but because of your mutant-like luck.”
“It’s not luck. It’s judgment.”
“No,” Mary said, shaking her head. “That’s the last thing it is. You have no judgment–not in the usual sense, anyhow. But what the hell. We’ll take this noser and hope your luck is holding as well as usual. But how can you live like this, Seth?” She gazed up plaintively into his face. “It’s not fair to me.”
“I’ve kept us going so far.”
“You’ve kept us here at this–kibbutz,” Mary said. “For eight years.”
“But now I’ve gotten us off.”
“To something worse, probably. What do we know about this new assignment? Nothing, except what Gossim knows– and he knows because he makes it his business to read over everyone else’s communications. He read your original prayer. . . I didn’t want to tell you because I knew it would make you so–”
“That bastard.” He felt red, huge fury well up inside him, spiked with impotence. “It’s a moral violation to read another person’s prayers.”
“He’s in charge. He feels everything is his business. Anyhow we’ll be getting away from that. Thank God. Come on; cool off. You can’t do anything about it; he read it years ago.”
“Did he say whether he thought it was a good prayer?”
Mary Morley said, “Fred Gossim would never say if it was. I think it was. Evidently it was, because you got the transfer.”
“I think so. Because God doesn’t grant too many prayers by Jews due to that covenant back in the pre-Intercessor days when the power of the Form Destroyer was so strong, and our relationship to him–to God, I mean–was so fouled up.”
“I can see you back in those days,” Mary said. “Kvetching bitterly about everything the Mentufacturer did and said.”
Morley said, “I would have been a great poet. Like David.”
“You would have held a little job, like you do now.” With that she strode off, leaving him standing in the doorway of the noser, one hand on his row of stored-away marmalade jars.
His sense of impotence rose within him, choking his windpipe. “Stay here!” he yelled after her. “I’ll leave without you!”
She continued on under the hot sun, not looking back and not answering.
For the remainder of the day Seth Morley busied himself loading their possessions into the _Morbid Chicken_. Mary did not show herself. He realized, toward dinnertime, that he was doing it all. Where is she? he asked himself. It’s not fair.
Depression hit him, as it generally did toward mealtime. I wonder if it’s all worth it, he said to himself. Going from one no-good job to another. I’m a loser. Mary is right about me; look at the job I did selecting a noser. Look at the job I’m doing loading this damn stuff in here. He gazed about the interior of the noser, conscious of the ungainly piles of clothing, books, records, kitchen appliances, typewriter, medical supplies, pictures, wear-forever couch covers, chess set, reference tapes, communications gear and junk, junk, junk. What have we in fact accumulated in eight years of work here? he asked himself. Nothing of any worth. And in addition, he could not get it all into the noser. Much would have to be thrown away or left for someone else to use. Better to destroy it, he thought gloomily. The idea of someone else gaining use of his possessions had to be sternly rejected. I’ll burn every last bit of it, he told himself. Including all the nebbish clothes that Mary’s collected in her jaybird manner. Selecting whatever’s bright and gaudy.